February 29, 1948
Jewish militants from the Lehi underground group mine train cars carrying British troops on the Cairo-Haifa line north of Rehovot. The attack uses one or more bombs placed on the tracks and detonated from an orange grove. The bombing kills at least 27 soldiers and wounds 35 others. Although the train is a daily express route for the general public, no civilians are hurt because of the targeting of the four troop-carrying cars added to the train.
Lehi says the attack is retaliation for the Ben Yehuda Street bombing in Jerusalem one week earlier, in which as many as 58 Jewish civilians were killed in an attack carried out by Arabs and British military deserters using British army vehicles.
While the rail system in Palestine has increasingly become a target of the Jewish resistance to British rule, the Rehovot bombing is part of an escalation of three-way violence in the period between the approval of the U.N. partition plan for Palestine and the Israeli Declaration of Independence.
The Cairo-Haifa train line is bombed again March 31, 1948, near Binyamina. Attributed to Lehi, the attack kills 40 and wounds 60 others. All the casualties are civilians; most are Arabs.